Riordan, Chief Called Responsible for Paramedic Crisis

While approving the emergency hiring of 50 paramedics, members of the Los Angeles City Council on Friday blasted the fire chief and the mayor for allowing the emergency medical system to deteriorate into a state of crisis.

Some council members questioned why Chief William R. Bamattre had failed to act sooner to address problems that have snowballed into record attrition rates, high levels of stress and long hours of forced overtime plaguing the paramedic ranks.

“We didn’t address this problem in an effective way sooner, and now we’re in a crisis situation with stopgap measures,” Councilwoman Laura Chick said during Friday’s session.

Other council members--longtime critics of Mayor Richard Riordan--said the primary responsibility for the paramedic breakdowns should rest with his administration, not the fire chief. They accused Riordan of discouraging department heads from seeking needed funds so the mayor could fulfill his campaign pledge to beef up the Police Department.

Bamattre and the mayor’s office insisted that no agency bosses--be they from the Fire Department or Recreation and Parks--had been coerced.

Councilwoman Rita Walters said that is not what she has heard.

Walters said department heads have told her they have been “arm wrestled, kicked, beaten down [and] threatened in the budgetary process before it reaches the council. And that occurs in the mayor’s office.”

Several general managers, she said, have complained that they were “threatened with loss of their jobs if they came to [the council] budget committee and breathed any notion at all” of their departments’ true needs.

As a result, according to Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, agency managers have been “discouraged by this administration to the point of intimidation.”

Regardless of alleged mayoral pressures, other council members said paramedic problems have been building for years and they faulted Bamattre for neglecting them.

“This is something that I really believe you should have stepped forward on earlier,” Councilman Joel Wachs told the chief during the council’s lengthy debate.

Chick said she offered $2 million to improve paramedic operations in last year’s budget, but Bamattre’s administration turned it down.

Deputy Mayor Jennifer Roth said in an interview that it was an affront to the fire chief and other general managers to suggest that they had failed to speak out because they were intimidated by Riordan.

“It’s insulting and denigrating to them as professionals,” she said.

Roth said the budget process is a months-long effort that includes input from the mayor’s office, council members and department heads. In the case of the Fire Department, she said, the budget has increased annually for the last five years.

Bamattre, speaking outside the council chambers, said he was never pressured by the mayor or his staff to hold back on hiring paramedics.

“The issue was never money,” the chief said. “I believe I asked for everything I needed.”

Bamattre said there are more paramedics today than when he assumed the department’s top job in 1995.

Still, Bamattre said, he welcomes the approval of the additional rescuers by the City Council.

For more than two years, Bamattre said, the department put its hiring on hold while an outside consultant looked at ways to bring more women and members of minorities onto the force.

At the same time, the chief said, he chose to fill paramedic vacancies by paying rescuers overtime to work the slots because it was cheaper than hiring and training recruits.

Nonetheless, Bamattre acknowledged that the mandate when Riordan was elected in 1993 was to hire more police officers.

“Everybody was supporting that,” the chief said. “And we, as the rest of the city departments, recognized that.”

In the end, despite the finger-pointing, the City Council voted unanimously to authorize the chief to begin hiring the 50 already licensed paramedics on a temporary basis. They have been identified through intense recruiting during the last several weeks across Southern California.

The new paramedics are expected to begin training in mid-November and be on the streets before the end of the year.

They are part of a package of emergency measures to address a number of problems in the city’s paramedic system, ranging from persistent dispatch problems to recruiting and retaining the highly trained rescuers.